The Hesperado

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

I didn't lie when not too long ago I posted my ostensibly final essay before closing up shop & ship on the H.M.S. Hesperado. I titled it "Au revoir" which, as a child reading Mary Poppins, I learned to my delight did not mean goodbye forever, so much as (roughly) "until I see you again". Not that I have any intention of resuming this wheezing carcass of a vessel. I only came back to get my porkpie hat and to remind any readers or ghosts who might still be reading of the essentials:

1. The problem is Islam -- not "Islamism" (or "political Islam" or any other word or term that isn't Islam: the ordinary mainstream Islam of all Muslims).

2. What is this problem? That Islam has a living blueprint going back to its inception 1,400 years ago and continuing to this very day, orienting its Muslims to do everything they can (including both stealth tactics and various forms of physical violence) to destroy the orders of non-Muslims and replace them with Sharia.

3. Are all Muslims part of this problem? Given the immense threat it poses, given the roiling complexity of the ongoing interpenetration of Muslims and their Islam into the West, and given the Islamic propensity toward taqiyya deception (for which there is a mountain of evidence, including time and time again the cases of the False Moderate), we can rephrase the question to a rhetorical warning: Can the West afford to assume otherwise?

4. How are we dealing with this problem? Not only does the West continue to indulge politically correct mantras & memes about points 1-3, the Counter-Jihad (whose main point is to wake up the West) remains largely incoherent about #1 and #2 -- and all but in deep De Nile about #3.

5. I.e., the West is toast. Oh, we'll be chugging along famously with our glitteringly protean technological advances for the duration of this 21st century; but with our general denial about this systemic, metastasizing problem, we won't last long after that.

I'll just get my hat if you don't mind and be on my way. Last one out turn out the lights.

Saturday, February 03, 2018

After eleven and a half years of writing essays on this blog (one thousand and four hundred and twenty-three, counting this one), I'm hanging up my hat.

This isn't the first time I have seriously contemplated shutting down my blog; it's happened a few times before. I hung on anyway, steeling myself in the pleasant sun & breeze
here on the H.M.S. Titanic, rearranging deck chairs while the Mainstream
Bands (including the Counter-Jihad) played the exotic dance music of De
Nile.

Frankly, I'm surprised I lasted this long. I'm getting out of Dodge mainly because of my dismay at the West in general, but more acutely at "the Counter-Jihad" for its various & sundry ways of being inept about what one would reasonably think is its chief role -- as an educator of the West about the problem of Islam. For years I've seen the rhetoric of "the Counter-Jihad" flounder and devolve into an incoherent mélange prevaricating between a problem of Islam and various hybrid mutations like "Islamism" or "Islamist extremism" or "political Islam" or "radical Islam" or "fundamentalist Islam", etc. etc. ad molestiam.

If that isn't bad enough, those stalwart men & women of "the Counter-Jihad" have to add insult to injury by twisting themselves into knots trying to save vast swaths of Muslims from their condemnation, through developing a particle physics taxonomy of Muslims, in order to create strange subspecies which will replace the one that they reject because of its politically correct smell: the Moderate Muslim. Thus, "the Counter-Jihad" has generated such terms as the Lax Muslims; the secular Muslims;the Muslims Who Don’t Know Their Own Islam;
the Muslims Who Are Too Afraid To Come Out of the Secularist
Closet; the MINO ("Muslim In Name Only", echoing the RINO, the "Republican In Name Only" or false Conservative); and many more.

It has become clear to me that the Counter-Jihad Mainstream is only different in degree, not in substance, from the broader Western Mainstream's Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist paradigm of a Tiny Minority of Extremists. The "Tiny" part may be tweaked by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, but not radically reassessed.

I'm tired of banging my head against the wall of both Mainstreams and seeing precious little effect or change. My conclusion, based upon the mountains of data we have (and the oceans of dots screaming for connection), is that if the West does not deport all Muslims from the West, Muslims will succeed in destroying the West eventually -- probably in about 100 years from now (give or take a decade or two). When I say "destroy" the West I don't necessarily mean "conquer" -- which would presuppose a successful (if horrific & bloody) transition into a new order. I only mean, at the least, that Mohammedans will succeed in ruining the West -- its social, physical and technological infrastructures -- reducing it to vast zones of civil unrest, marauding gangs of Muslims, killing fields, rampant violence in general, and (needless to say) a breakdown in economies, governance, and basic utilities. It's also become clear to me that the vast majority "in the Counter-Jihad" don't see the problem & danger of Islam this way at all; they have a much more optimistic view of the future (that is, when they're not indulging their Real-Problemer conspiracy theories about their own supposedly evil West).

Anywho, I've said all I can say. I don't know what more I can say. Many times, I've said the same thing in different ways -- every which way but loose.

֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍

The past 11-1/2 years seems much longer; sometimes it feels like a lifetime has passed. When I began in the summer of 2006, I had come of age in the Post-911 Era, with my first rude aftershock -- the Tube bombing in London a year prior -- under my belt, deepening and sobering my alarm at the problem of Islam, which for a good couple of years I had begun plunging into in terms of autodidactic study. As the years went along, more horrific bumps in the road jolted me into ever deeper appraisals of the problem -- and of two other problems: the problem of a West strangely persisting in denial about the primary problem (of Islam); and the problem of a "Counter-Jihad" stubbornly stuck in incoherence about what those two problems are exactly, and what its role should be in terms of them.

At any rate, ending a long project grants one a kind of freedom similar to that which one's last day on a job -- or on Earth -- may confer. I've given some thought this last post; should I go out in style, like Jack Paar and Johnny Carson chose to do? Should I just swing my golf club with a carefree Bob Hope grin and say "Thanks for the memories"...? Should I redon my black fedora and "retire" like Sinatra in 1970? Or do a Regis Philbin walk down Memory Lane?

Or not.

֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍

Of course, I'll leave my blog standing. Consider it an archive of hundreds and hundreds of essays, analyzing from a variety of angles the reason why the West is ultimately doomed -- doomed to allow Mohammedans to despoil its centuries of hard work, genius, and progress.

In many respects the challenge of Islamic terror is unique, hence the
difficulty western intelligence services encountered trying to predict
and prevent its onslaughts. The enemy is not, of course, a religion --
most Muslims deplore what has occurred.

That was written five months after 911, on February 12, 2002, by that infamous Leftist, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher. Apparently, Thatcher had a special mind-reading machine that is capable of reading the minds of over 500 million Muslims (the low end of her "most Muslims").

Friday, February 02, 2018

Baron Bodissey, who, along with his wife Dymphna (no, not their real names) runs one of the major Counter-Jihad websites (Gates of Vienna, on my blogroll, while he has never put my blog on his blogroll, even though he knows me well and knows my blog and his blog has a humungus list of other websites on Islam) on the Internet (i.e., most of reality for the modern world), recently posted a clever little essay, Syllogislam, showing someone's diagram (I guess a "Venn diagram" whatever the fuck that is). His analytical explanation of the diagram was as follows:

1.

No Muslims are Jihadists. (In other words, the classes are disjoint.)

2.

All and only Muslims are Jihadists. (In other words, the classes are identical.)

3.

All Muslims are Jihadists, but not all Jihadists are
Muslims. (In other words, the class of Muslims is a proper subset of the
class of Jihadists.)

4.

All Jihadists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are
Jihadists. (In other words, the class of Jihadists is a proper subset of
the class of Muslims.)

5.

Some and only some Muslims are Jihadists. (In other words, the classes overlap, but only in part.)

Bodissey then commented:

"In order for “S is anti-Muslim” to follow from “S is anti-Jihadist,”
either 2 or 3 must be true. But notice that in both of them, all Muslims
are Jihadists. So T, unwittingly, is saying that all Muslims are
Jihadists!"

Two days ago, I emailed him my response:

There's another possibility: T is
saying that S thinks that way. And I think the Ts of the West are being
more logical than the Counter-Jihad. If we condemn Islam for the
mountain of good reasons we have, how are we not also condemning those
people who follow, affirm, support, enable, think Islam is their meaning
of life? (And who when challenged, prevaricate and tap-dance with
sophistry -- including the "Reformers" (though rarely do Counter-Jihad
people ask them challenging questions)).

The
only way out of this for the Counter-Jihad is to elaborate a particle
physics of Muslims who are somehow... not Muslim ("lax Muslims",
"Muslims in name only" (MINOs), "secular Muslims" ( a recent Spencer
howler), etc.). This would be fine, if verifiable; unfortunately for
our long-term safety, such well-intentioned virtue signalling is not
verifiable.

Bodissey still hasn't responded. I can't imagine how he could get out of this corner. Not that I give a fuck anymore

Thursday, February 01, 2018

Wrong. It was written by one of the owners of one of the major Counter-Jihad blogs on the Internet -- Gates of Vienna. The writer is Dymphna who, along with her husband Baron Bodissey, runs a site that often is quite useful and informative, particularly of the European scene with regard to the problem of Islam. Not only did Dymphna write that strange sentence, in the comments field of an article posted by her husband ("Syllogislam" -- more about that in a subsequent post), she wrote it as an anxious corrective to a reader who dared to say that:

In my mind, and I believe in reality, there are no non-muzlim jihadists,
so the the set of all jihadists is identical with a subset of all
muzlims.

And in her immediately preceding response to another commenter, she adds this relic of fossilized data from an (what should be) outmoded paradigm:

The 2011 study done by the Middle East Forum did find that 20% of
American mosques do not preach jihad. And current day jihad is largely
driven by Wahhabist doctrine.

Apparently, Dymphna has a narrow definition of jihadists as "practitioners of violent jihad". It's also apparent that she thinks non-violent (and non-"Wahhabist") jihad is benign. Or does she even believe non-violent jihad exists at all -- such as Jihad of the Pen and of the Tongue: taqiyya propaganda & sophistry deployed to wage Stealth Jihad, the seditious infiltration that is preparatory to a (scale of) violent jihad which Muslims may at the time think unpropitious? Does she even know about the Stealth Jihad at all? Or maybe she thinks the only Stealth Jihad afoot is "Wahhabist" (and a "twisting" or "hijacking" or normative mainstream Islam)? To all of these deadly nuances Dymphna seems oblivious.

The finding she adduces from the Middle East Forum -- that 20% of
American mosques do not preach jihad -- should be preposterous to anyone who has been studying the problem of Islam for the past 15 years (as I reasonably assume Dymphna and her husband have been doing). Teaching/preaching Islam without Jihad would be like teaching orthodox Christianity without the Incarnation or without Salvation. Again, Dymphna's conception of what jihad means must be so constricted, she assumes, apparently, that it's not there when the Muslims in question are not vociferating the takbir and lighting a bomb-fuse.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Robert Spencer, the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad, posted a report on his flagship site, Jihad Watch, of a recent Republican, Phillip Parrish, running for governor of Minnesota. What Spencer finds note- and newsworthy are two things: 1) what Parrish said, and 2) the reaction of a Muslim, Regina Mustafa, founder of some Taqiyya-Dawa organization, Community Interfaith Dialogue on Islam.

What did Parrish say?

Parrish said that “Islam, Sharia and the Quran are the antithesis of the U.S. Constitution.”

He said this in a communication to Regina Mustafa, after she emailed him and asked him to sit down with her to learn what true Islam is after she had learned that Parrish had sat down with an "outspoken critic of Islam", Usama Dakdok (more about him later). Parrish's response to Regina Mustafa also included his telling challenge to her to, according to the reporter for the PostBulletin, Heather J. Carlson, "publicly denounce Sharia law".

And what was the reaction of Regina Mustafa, the Islamopologist?

She said (apparently according to the reporter Heather J. Carlson) that

...Parrish's remarks demonstrate a lack of understanding about Islam. She said Muslims
in America have demonstrated a respect for both the U.S. Constitution
and their religion and his comments are unfair to the Muslim men and
women who have served in the U.S. armed forces.

And what was Spencer's response?

Note the sleight of hand. Parrish said that “Islam, Sharia and the
Quran are the antithesis of the U.S. Constitution.” In response, Mustafa
“said Muslims in America have demonstrated a respect for both the U.S.
Constitution and their religion and his comments are unfair to the
Muslim men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces.”

Parrish wasn’t talking about Muslims, he was talking about Islam. The
two are conflated endlessly, but they are not the same, any more than
Christians and Christianity are the same.

Was the Muslima's response merely "sleight of hand"? My essays on the need for a paradigm shift in the Counter-Jihad would beg to differ. It's not merely this one Muslima who is connecting a criticism of Islam with a criticism of Muslims. The entire Western mainstream does this, time and time again. And as sure as rain follows rain, Spencer complains about it, but doesn't engage the obvious logic that moves them to make this connection. If we in the Counter-Jihad are going to criticize -- or, more robustly, condemn -- Islam, how are we not also criticizing -- or condemning -- Muslims who affirm, defend, and enable Islam? The Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream has made a veritable industry out of avoiding this most central question, through an evasive tap-dance of sophistry, apparently motivated by an anxiety not to be branded as "racists" by the broader Western Mainstream. Or some of them actually believe the incoherent double-virtue-signalling they peddle.

Monday, January 29, 2018

In my focus of late on the nougaty softness in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream of Robert Spencer, Christine Douglass-Williams, and Hugh Fitzgerald (three different flavors of nougat), I'd forgotten about another member (just barely) in the Leadership: Raymond Ibrahim.

One reason he slipped my mind is because he publishes far fewer articles on Jihad Watch, that bastion of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, than the others; and when he does publish, his articles often contain no palpable signs of nougat.

Although in it I distinguished between “radical” Muslims and those many
Muslims in name only; although I (very conservatively) suggested that
perhaps ten percent of the world’s Muslims are “Islamists,” and of
those, only two percent are willing to take violent action to enforce
their supremacist worldview; and although I said “Islamists have killed
far more Muslims than members of any other group” — YouTube deemed that
video “inappropriate” for younger audiences.

A more blatant display -- and attempted justification -- of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream's habit of "double virtue-signalling" would be hard to find.

But let's get back to that title. “Radical Islam: The Most Dangerous Ideology.” More and more among the Readership (as opposed to the Leadership) of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, one finds the elementary wisdom expressed every time they see dysphemic phrases like “radical Islam” or “Islamism” (or worse, extra padding with “extremist Islamism”) or “political Islam” etc. When you watch Raymond's video, you find him using "Islamism" and "Islamist" copiously. Has Raymond been watching Maajid Nawaz lately...? At any rate, the problem is obvious. Each one of these terms clearly implies that Islam itself is okay, and that only some offshoot variety is the problem. Such dysphemic locutions are meant to virtue-signal to our broader Western Mainstream: "Look PC MC Masters, I'm not a bad Islamophobe! See???" Meanwhile, Raymond is virtue-signalling to his Counter-Jihad Mainstream Readership: "Look at what a bold and fearless Counter-Jihadist I am -- hell, I'm so rough and tough against [Radical] Islam[ism], that the big bad Elitist Leftist YouTube restricted me!"

But the joke's on us. As can be seen by Raymond's anxious attempts to please our PC MC Masters in his subsequent paragraph quoted above and the reaction YouTube had by yanking his videos, the PC MC Masters are voracious. They won't be pleased by our attempts to minimize the problem by padding our phrases with nougaty pudding. They will not tolerate any substantive criticism of Islam -- nor of anything that clearly hints at it. So Raymond is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. So why doesn't he? Does he really believe that "many
Muslims in name only" subscribe to their Islam? How many is "many"? And how does he know about any of those "many" that they subscribe to their Islam "in name only"? Because he knows some nice friendly Muslims who wear blue jeans? Because he's seen "many" Muslims protest that they "do not believe in terrorism" and that "Islam is peace"?

And that's where the broader Western Mainstream is being more logical than those in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream. Raymond (and Robert and Christine and Hugh and most others in the CJM) thinks he can get away with clearly implying that Islam is the problem and then pretending he's not saying that ordinary mainstream Islam is the danger? (Or worse, does he really believe his own nougat, like Daniel Pipes does?)

And then the Raymonds (and Roberts and Christines and Hughs of the CJM) think they can get away with avoiding responsibility for the next clear implication their counter-jihad rhetoric contains: If we are going to condemn Islam -- the normative, mainstream Islam of all Muslims -- how can we possibly avoid condemning all Muslims? The broader Western Mainstream can see this; meanwhile the Counter-Jihad Mainstream pretends it can do the one without implying the other.

This kind of incoherence in the rhetoric of the Counter-Jihad can't go on forever. At some point, the Leadership will have to make a clear decision: Either support Islam but "not the Tiny Minority of Extremists Who Are Twisting Islam" thereby letting off the hook the vast majority of Muslims -- OR condemn Islam and all Muslims (conceding, of course, that there may exist a certain small number of Muslims who are not part of the problem of Islam, but that because we cannot, given taqiyya, determine who and where they are with certitude sufficient for the purposes of our primary obligation -- the ongoing safety of our societies -- they ought not factor in to that primary obligation).

Meanwhile, Mohammedans continue brewing their toxic coffee which, apparently, the Counter-Jihad is not waking up and smelling.

P.S.: I dipped into the Readership -- nearly 70 comments -- and not one brought up Raymond's dysphemic nougat. So much for the Readership being slightly ahead of the Leadership curve...

Note to self and to readers: Yesterday, I rather hastily reposted an older essay ("Islamic Conferences", still below), and now see that the first link no longer works. The perils of blogging includes the graveyard of dead links. It then takes time and work to go hunting down a workable link for that. And I haven't yet checked the other links...

In the meantime, readers and visitors can always take a scroll & stroll into the luxurious forest of over 1,400 essays I've written over the past 10+ years...

Sunday, January 28, 2018

[Note: This essay is a reprise of an earlier essay I posted some 4 years ago]

What goes on at various Islamic conferences around the world?

Not, apparently, what one would expect at, say, a conference of Methodist ministers and laity (e.g., take a look at this document
of the proceedings a 2011 Methodist conference in Louisiana: mostly,
the activities detailed in unremarkably thorough fashion are
mind-numbingly banal and boring minutiae of procedural bureaucracy; and
otherwise involve efforts to help the poor through charity and
outreach).At
Islamic conferences, on the other hand, there are apparently more
important things to discuss -- such as the fine points of who is the
Enemy and in what contexts and under what textual pretexts is it licit
to fight and kill the Enemy.

As documented at
Memri.org, (which regularly translates from Arabic into English key
documents out of the Muslim world), Shaikh Qaradawi presided over a
discussion at a major conference among Islamic clerics (held in 2003 in
Stockholm, Sweden, of all places -- Allah help us) in which he
supported the following statement articulating the relationship between
Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the justification for terror
attacks:

It
has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of
people of Dar Al-Harb is not protected. Because they fight against and
are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of
[their] blood and [their] property...

As
we know (or should know by now), "Dar Al-Harb" is the entire
non-Muslim world; and "the people of Dar Al-Harb" are all non-Muslims of
the world.

I.e.,
the lives and property of all non-Muslims are licit for Muslims to
take -- on the vague pretext that we "fight against" and/or "are hostile
towards" them.

Notice too that Qaradawi doesn't say "If they fight against Muslims..." but rather he says "Because
they fight against Muslims...". I.e., it's already assumed that the
natural state of non-Muslims is to be fighting against Muslims and/or to
be hostile towards them.

This
is a clear legitimization of terrorism by Muslims against any
Unbelievers anywhere in the world where it is perceived by Muslims that
those Unbelievers are "fighting against" and/or "are hostile towards"
Muslims -- couched of course by Qaradawi in phraseology providing
sophistical wiggle room for loopholes by which he could try to argue
that he does not support terrorism against "innocent" people; etc.

Conclusion:

Take a look at the tafsir (=
exegesis) of Ibn Kathir, one of the most respected and authoritative
and mainstream of all Koran commentators, and read what he has to say
about Koran verses 5:32-33, where he argues that the unbelief of
Unbelievers is tantamount, if not equivalent, to "waging war" against
Muslims.

I.e., according to this Islamic conference at
which Qaradawi presided, following the mainstream logic of Islamic
tradition as represented, for example, by Ibn Kathir, our very existence
as Unbelievers -- as people who do not submit to Islam -- is itself,
ipso facto a casus belli for Muslims to wage "defensive" war against our offensive nature
as non-Muslims. For, as non-Muslims, we dare to continue to live our
lives without Allah's guidance, and to organize our societies by setting
up polities and laws that ignore the laws as set out by Allah in the
Koran and by His Last Prophet, Mohammed, as documented in the Sunna -- and
as clarified by Islamic scholars throughout the ages, from Ibn Kathir
in the 14th century, to Shaikh Qaradawi in the 21st century.

Monday, January 22, 2018

For background, see Part 1, and for a general discussion getting into the meat of the matter, see the much more extensive Part 2.

In Part 1, I observed:

...there seems to dominate in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream a tacit
consensus to agree with Ezra Levant, Jordan Peterson, and Gad Saad, in their fastidious fear of the cooties transmitted by people like
Faith Goldy...

The reason this is a likely implication is that the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (e.g., Jihad Watch, Gates of Vienna, Ruthfully Yours, Frontpage) hasn't uttered a peep about what these Three Horsemen did to Faith Goldy; and instead have approvingly featured them on their venues.

I also posed the following question in Part 1:

...is the Jihad Watch team (by passive extension for approvingly publishing
Ezra Levant and Jordan Peterson, but not Faith Goldy) able to skate by in this regard?

The answer to that all depends on what the Readership (the Civilians) of the Counter-Jihad want to do. Will they continue to sit passively letting the Leadership pursue a soft approach to the problem of Islam (and to the problem of the problem, the West's continued myopia to the primary problem)? Or will they pipe up and let their voice be heard, that they are not satisfied with the Leadership continuing to put lipstick on the pig of Islam AND Muslims?

As I noted in Part 2, the main person who punished Faith Goldy for her free speech by gagging her free speech (as best he could, by firing her from his venue, The Rebel Media), Ezra Levant, seems to be as egregiously soft on Islam as Robert Spencer and his colleague Christine Douglass-Williams, and others in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray, and Sam Harris (though there is trouble in the Paradise of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, insofar as Sam Harris continues to keep Spencer at an arm's-length for fear of catching his cooties -- which might change, now that Sam's friend Ayaan, as chummy & cozy as he is with the transparent snake-reformer Muslim Maajid Nawaz, has publicly praised Spencer's new book; but that's a tangled web for another day).

We could also position Ezra Levant in the general vicinity of the fuzzy category of the "Alt Right". Thus, when Jihad Watch, a main bastion of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, published Ezra Levant praising the egregiously soft-on-Islam Christine Douglass-Williams, and describing his position on Islam in appallingly soft terms --

...she is a promoter of Islam in the sense
that we are and Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah and Saleem Mansour [are]-- that
is, an Islam that coexists with the West, a patriotic democratic
liberal Islam, progressive Islam, critical of political Islam…

-- this was a sign as clear as any of the alliance of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream with what we could call the "Alt Right Mainstream".

Another example caught my attention more recently, again on Jihad Watch, that bastion of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream. The details have to be digested, piece by piece, to fully grasp the irony and hypocrisy here as both Mainstreams increasingly embrace each other: Robert Spencer is approvingly featuring Paul Weston (another "safe" Counter-Jihad Mainstreamer who doesn't condemn Muslims, just Islam, with vague references to "jihadists" and "immigrants"), whose Jihad Watch feature praises Jordan Peterson -- Paul Weston on Cathy Newman and Jordan Peterson’s spectacular takedown of Leftist dogma -- one of the leading lights of the Alt Right Mainstream. And, as I have been arguing in Part 2, I say "Mainstream" because of Peterson joining Levant in the cowardly hypocrisy of justifying their respective punishments of Faith Goldy for her "incorrect" speech (and her failure to practice "correct" speech). Given this context, Spencer's introduction is unwittingly rich in irony & hypocrisy:

The Leftist establishment, in the UK as well as in the US, demands
that certain opinions must be accepted; dissenters are tarred with
charges with “racism” and “bigotry.”

Exactly what Jordan Peterson, friend of Jihad Watch Ezra Levant, and Gad Saad did to Faith Goldy. Oh the irony! More from Spencer:

These opinions have for the Left
the status of religious dogma, never to be questioned. Among these, of
course, is the false claim that Islam is a Religion of Peace. Jordan
Peterson and Cathy Newman do not discuss that claim, but the motion here
is the same: their interview is a marvelous example of what happens
when truth and reality meets Leftist dogma.

Just as I observed in Part 2: various Leadership of the Alt Right, such as the up-and-coming favorite Jordan Peterson, don't seem to be all that concerned about Islam, but their concerns about other issues in opposition to the prevailing dogma of PC MC (and of the "Leftism" of Spencer's idée fixe) make them attractive to the Counter-Jihad Mainstream -- particularly as both share a concern for "pragmatism" over principle; i.e., playing it safe in order to survive, at the cost of selling their soul to the broader Mainstream (that is, if they weren't soft on principle all along, making their sell-out not that much of a sacrifice...).

I hope my readers detect the irony here: both of these groups -- the Alt Right and the Counter-Jihad -- have developed buoyed along by a sentiment to buck the status quo, to be a radical voice for a perspective that is regularly marginalized by the broader Mainstream. In the process, they have become streamlined into mainstream versions of themselves. Perhaps Levant should call his fearlessly maverick show The Mainstream Rebel...? Or is it possible that Robert Spencer and Ezra Levant were always soft on Islam, and they and Jordan Peterson were always unwilling to press the principle of Free Speech to its valid conclusion, and have only been skating by all these years on the fumes of pretending they were tougher? We'll never know until their Readership becomes bold enough to ask these kinds of questions openly.

I have more familiarity with the Readership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, and from what I can tell, many of them might be fed up with the softness, hypocrisy & incoherence
of their Leadership, but they don't admit it. Mostly, because the vast majority of the Readership never criticize their Leadership on these matters, it seems on the surface that they are fairly happy with the Leadership. When you read their thoughts, however, as I have in thousands of comments by probably thousands of individuals in various discussion forums over the years, perhaps a majority of them seem to be coming from a stance markedly tougher than the Counter-Jihad Mainstream; but at the same time, they seem passively afraid to
"rock the boat" and would rather just let that Leadership continue
being incoherently soft on Islam because "it's better than anything else
being done," in the hope that if they throw enough vaguely anti-Islam stuff at the wall of the Mainstream West long enough, maybe something will
eventually stick.

An "Alt Counter-Jihad" would clearly articulate a tougher position on the problem of Islam (by, among other things, clarifying that the problem of Islam is at the same time the problem of all Muslims). Its stance would be: enough is enough with this mealy-mouthed, phony bravado about being tough on "jihadism" or "political "Islam" or "Islamist extremism" without at the very least promoting a general conversation in the movement with internal voices who disagree.

Will such an "Alt Counter-Jihad" ever develop? Given all I've seen over the years, I remain pessimistic.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

(See Part 1 for a brief smattering of thoughts and questions to think about on this topic.)

Nearly one year ago, on February 10 in 2017, I posted an essay here proposing the development (or recognition) of an Alt Counter-Jihad:

It's about time for an "Alt-Counter-Jihad". After all, there's an
"Alt Right" and an "Alt Media". And like those latter two, an
Alt-Counter-Jihad is needed to redress deficiencies in an existing order
-- namely, what I call the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream".

One wrinkle I had not factored in at the time is how the "Alt Right" particularly continues to be troubled by aspersions cast upon it by many on the right, and even some who might be termed "far Right" -- and, even more strangely, by some who proudly own the "Alt Right" title. Not only that, but this odd species of sociopolitical movement doesn't quite exist in any coherent way (not that the "Right" and the "Left" are all that coherent as sociopolitical movements, for that matter). Indeed, the various terms that have cropped up over the decades -- "far right", "far left", "ultra-right", "ultra-left", etc. -- indicate that the terminology is trying to capture some sort of reality, but can't quite get a handle on it. One little epiphany I had years ago came like a splash of cold water when I noted how the remarkable march on Washington by the "Tea Party" (the "Alt Right"of the old days) back in the late summer of 2009 had a long list of goals and grievances, but if you looked for anything directly concerned about the problem of Islam and Muslims, you would have looked in vain, when that problem should have been at least in the top 5 bullet points of their entire march. Similarly, today's Alt Right seems to regard that problem as low down on their bucket list. An overarching dynamic to the whole mess is that the Leftist compass point, so to speak, seems to have taken over the Center, pulling it Leftward, and as a consequence, also pulling the Right off its bearings, causing the Right to split into two or more divisions, with most of those divisions buying into the framework of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC). At any rate, we don't need to get into the historical/ philosophical complexities of this issue (see my essay from September 2008,
Left / Right / East / West / South / North) for today's theme, but it's worth keeping in mind as we continue along here.

As we observe various members of these species of right winger, we notice some of them seem to be leery of catching the "racist"-cum-"neo-Nazi" cooties of those they deem to have gone too far. Whether those career-destroying cooties pertain to the "Alt Right" is not a simplex question. In some parts of this sociopolitical zone, and among some individuals described (or self-described) as belonging to it, one could reasonably impute such cooties -- as, for example, with Richard Spencer. However, the problem with this is that the sociopolitical culture of PC MC, which dominates our societies throughout most of the West, tends often to exaggerate these issues, to the point of slandering as "racists" and/or as "neo-Nazis" some individuals or groups who are not veritable racists nor (most certainly) not neo-Nazis.

This slander may be outright, or it may be implied up the sleeve of an otherwise seemingly polite "disinvitation". So now we get to the case of Faith Goldy.

Discussion:

In our Part 1, we raised the question of whether Faith Goldy is even really "in the Counter-Jihad". Usually, someone who may be defined as such spends most of their communication & activist time on issues directly related to the problem of Islam (including the problem of Western PC MCs displaying myopia to that primary problem). In that specific regard, Faith doesn't seem to qualify. On the other hand, parenthetical statements she makes during interviews (e.g., when during her interview with Gavin McInnes, she made brief but pointed mention about the genocide of Christians in the Middle East) indicates she has more awareness and savvy about that problem than many right-wingers who are not in the Counter-Jihad orbit.

At any rate, it doesn't really matter to our theme whether or not she appropriately occupies her time on the problem of Islam, and whether or not she if she is Counter-Jihad, she is nougaty soft (i.e., insisting that the problem is "political Islam" rather than ordinary mainstream Islam and that "I am not anti-Muslim, only anti-Islam, because Most Muslims Just Wanna Have a Sandwich," etc.). What matters is how others have treated her for her "sin" of having sat down for an interview with a group deemed to have "racist" and "neo-Nazi" cooties without also making sure to level critical questions/comments back at them to demonstrate to the world that she is not of their ilk. For these arbiters of what's Right have demonstrated their asymptotic anxiety for catching cooties defined as such, in great part, by our broader Western Mainstream suffused with Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC). And part and parcel of that (and even worse), they have demonstrated their incoherence, if not hypocrisy, on the critical issue of Free Speech.

Thus this theme occupies an area of overlap or intersection, so to speak, between the ordinary Alt-Right and the Counter-Jihad. These two movements are not synonymous, though they do share a lot of thoughts and feelings. Both tend to be attacked by the broader Western Mainstream (itself pro-Leftist on most issues), and one sees various individuals from both finding common cause, admiring each other, and sometimes working together. However, if you take a Jordan Peterson, for example, admired by all who are opposed to the SJW/Black Lives Matter/Gender Fluidity movement and similar Leftist shibboleths, and do a search on what he thinks about Islam, you come up with very little, compared to his obviously greater concerns for the aforementioned social issues.

Speaking of Jordan Peterson, he's one of the three individuals who punished Faith Goldy for her "sin". The other two are Ezra Levant and Gad Saad. (Others I don't know about may also have punished her for this or may have supported the Three Horsemen in their punishment of her; I haven't spent an inordinate amount of time researching this nor plunged into the Twitterverse to find out.)

What happened?

Up until late summer of last year, Faith Goldy was happily pursuing her career as a reporter/journalist for Ezra Levant's alternative news media venue, The Rebel Media. I began to become a fan of hers rather late, a little less than a year ago, as I began to notice links to YouTube videos of her reporting on Levant's venue, or sometimes individual videos of her being interviewed or simply speaking to the camera in her infectiously hyperventilating, scintillating way. Back to late summer of last year: When an event involving the welter of "far Right" issues was scheduled to happen in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August -- the "Unite the Right" rally -- she decided on her own to go down there and cover it with a camerman. (She emphasizes in a recent interview that she did this on her own, and was not sent there by her day job, The Rebel Media.) Part of the reason for a journalist to cover an event like this was the opposition it would likely attract from far Left groups, such as Antifa -- mainly a European phenomenon, but since Trump and the consequent mass neurosis of anti-Trump hysteria, increasingly active in the Americas -- along with other motley individuals and groups out of the amorphous nebula of the Left -- SJWs and Black Lives Matter, etc. And related to this, the likelihood that the Mainstream Media, besotted as it is with PC MC, would not be able to cover the nuances fairly or intelligently.

At that event, Faith was on the very street where the vehicular homicide happened, a terrible incident that catapulted this particular rally from just one of many to the top of the world headlines -- particularly as the driver of the car was "far Right" and the female victim who died was part of the Leftist protest, thus feeding into the broader Western Mainstream's PC MC bias against anything too right-wing. After that startling tragedy, Faith was invited to be interviewed by one of the voices of those who had organized the "Unite the Right" rally, The Daily Stormer. Wikipedia is, as usual, of no help in matters like this; its article on this voice tags it as "neo-Nazi" but provides no evidence for the tag (other than a New York Times article and a Los Angeles Times article, both of which do the same thing). So I thought I'd check out the main site of The Daily Stormer for myself. What I found there was precious little that was anti-Islam per se, but a lot of stuff fixated on race and Jews, with indications here and there of a Real-Problemer worldview. One story, headlined --

"The Government Just Shut Down! IT’S WALKING DEAD OUT THERE MAN, FIND A PLACE TO HOLE-UP!"

-- is a long essay on a relatively normal hiccup in American government (a shutdown of funding while partisan bickering consumes Congress), whose prose woven by the creator of The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, is a clever mixture of cheeky, seemingly self-deprecating sarcasm about a Mad Max Apocalypse -- which plays up going over the top so that the reader is disarmed into thinking Anglin is kidding around -- with warnings essentially serious about such Real-Problemerism. That, and the frequent sprinklings on various postings there of words like "Kike" and imputations of Jews controlling the Mainstream that needs to be revolted against, would I suppose put The Daily Stormer in or near the general vicinity of the ballpark of "neo-Nazi".
So this is the voice or venue which, at the time of the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, after the tragedy that culminated it (and no doubt during the media firestorm that ensued), asked Faith Goldy to sit down for an interview, and she complied. As she points out in one of her subsequent interviews (after she was punished by her own colleagues & those who otherwise would be on her side), she was under no obligation, being the subject of the interview, to make sure she criticized her interviewer in a show of virtue-signalling. Faith also articulated a good argument for why journalists should be interested in social phenomena like this, because it reflects a growing trend among disaffected white men in America, and it would behoove us to try to understand their grievances rather than continually barrage them with hostile denunciations, which would tend to cause them to "fester" (her word) and get worse in their alienation. Journalists who shine a light on them, then, would be doing a double service: educating the public about this (in an intelligent descriptive analytical way, rather than through demagogic demonization which has become the norm in the Mainstream); and perhaps also helping to slow down or even reverse the "festering" which such demonization only exacerbates. As a preparation for her investigative reporting of this rally, in fact, Faith said in one of her subsequent interviews that she prepared by taking time out (four months) to read extensively (and video-watch) materials written (and taped) by these various groups of the Alt Right who were going to take part in the "Unite the Right" rally. She wanted to try to understand them by their own words, rather than exclusively relying upon our Mainstream media to tell us what to think. One would think this is a normative virtue in journalism; but alas, it seems to be rare in our time.

The first I heard of all this, it was mentioned by a civilian commenter who posted on a Jihad Watch article by Robert Spencer's colleague, Christine Williams-Douglass, which featured her interviewed by Ezra Levant. At the start of that interview, Levant defines his position and the position of his venue, The Rebel Media:

...a member of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a woman of color who was active in race relations was fired by Justin Trudeau because she was a critic of radical Islam. Now, she is a promoter of Islam in the sense that we are and Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah and Saleem Mansour -- that is, an Islam that coexists with the West, a patriotic democratic liberal Islam, progressive Islam, critical of political Islam…

It couldn't be clearer from these words that Ezra Levant is remarkably soft on Islam (virtually as bad as Daniel Pipes); and of course his interview subject, Christine Williams-Douglass, unsurprisingly agrees with him on this. Indeed, Levant goes on to praise her for her recent book which enshrines the hope she has (hopes which she hopes the Counter-Jihad and the West will have) in the Reformer Muslims showcased in that book (see my discussions about this).As I said, a commenter in the comments thread to the above Jihad Watch article pointed out in passing that Ezra Levant had recently fired Faith Goldy, which made me go "Huh...???" So out of curiosity I investigated further, and found a few interviews Faith had done after that. One can also find videos of Ezra Levant -- and the other two who also threw her under the bus (Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad) -- explaining in solemn tones why their pusillanimity is virtuous, if the readers can stomach such nauseating displays of cowardly sanctimony. Essentially, Levant dropped her from his show like a hot potato because she had become radioactive -- merely because of that interview she gave to The Daily Stormer and because she failed to level critical questions at her interviewer.After that happened, when she was interviewed by Gavin McInness, she didn't go on a counter-attack against her former boss, Levant, but remained gracious, telling Gavin she has enormous respect for Levant and that he “is the only guy in the game [in Canada] when it comes to speaking right wing common sense in the media sphere”. Similarly, when speaking directly about Jordan Peterson, who subsequently "disinvited" her from a colloquium about free speech (oh, the irony!), she had mostly kind words for him as a sort of mentor she had admired for years. In elliptical ways, though, she made allusion to the elementary error Peterson and the other two made -- putting "pragmatism" above "principle". The pragmatism in this regard being, essentially, fear of catching the cooties Faith Goldy might have -- cooties which, if "caught" would supposedly damage the movement (whatever that movement is -- apparently not a movement based on the principle of "free speech"). In his official statement on this, Jordan Peterson. looking academically rumpled and gravely dapper, comes off as shameful when you pause for a nanosecond to think of the Orwellian irony to which he's evidently oblivious:

“…but I believe that she failed in her journalistic responsibility; and as a consequence of that, she became too hot a property for – and not just for us… and…. well… that was the reason for the decision.”
By the way, note that curious part where he says "...and not just for us... and... well...". It's almost as though he was about to reveal who else had wanted Faith Goldy removed from the Free Speech panel, but at the last moment decided to withhold their names.

Faith's response to the whole brouhaha:

“So my understanding is that they thought I didn’t ask enough questions during an interview in which I was the one being interviewed. Now riddle me this [she said, with a delicious tone of sarcasm]: Okay, so we’re having an event about Free Speech, and I get pulled for not using my speech correctly… I don’t know… I don’t know… I’m not looking for a fight, but all I have to say, I’ve really tried to diminish a lot of the flames that have erupted in the wake of this decision to disinvite me from the event. But that being said, not all the Masses are asses: This irony, this hypocritical stance is not lost on the wise audience that… frankly belongs to Jordan Peterson. And we do have a bit of a Venn diagram there, not wholly, of course. It’s not lost on them. It’s this business of “never meet your heroes” etc. Look, these are strange times and all of us are going to have our feet held to the fire, and the question is, are you about principle, or are you about pragmatism? And I heard a LOT of use of the word ‘pragmatism’ when those gentlemen were offering up their answers to the young man who posited why I was not included in the redux version of their Free Speech panel.”

In sum, Faith Goldy's reaction to her punishment was a class act in its overt presentation, while deftly she communicated between the lines the violation of the principle by those Three Horsemen who are supposed to stand eminently for that principle -- which should outrage us all in the Counter-Jihad (when it does not just make us depressed with dismay).Links:Faith Goldy & Gavin McInness Faith Goldy on Free Bird MediaFaith Goldy on No BullshitP.S.:

In the second video linked above, at 9:20 forward (though my transcription below begins before that to introduce the context, at just shy of the 8:00 mark), Faith articulates a sound critique of the slimy Gad Saad (whom I've called "vaguely fishy" and have had occasion to mention previously), one of the three stalwart Alt Righters who decided to gag her free speech in the interest of the principle of ... "correct" free speech:“Before the Unite the Right event I had probably about 4 months in which I really undertook a very serious study of the Alt Right to get familiar with, you know, the bigwigs, to start reading... their literature, see what their movements and all their different bifurcations and etc., and [what] all the offshoots of their umbrella really were. So I went there as a responsible journalist -- who, by the way, didn't see a single Nazi armband or 'Seig Heil' in the Charlottesville proper area. And everyone said, "That's a tacit endorsement" because I didn't disavow an entire group of people, largely young white men who feel disenfranchised in society, who feel that they've been told because they're male and because they're whites they're not allowed to have an opinion and indeed succeed, etc., in society... because I said... you know... some of these guys might be onto something, maybe we should talk to them, air out some of this dirty laundry, not just keep on pushing them to the gutter where they're going to fester -- that all of a sudden it was a tacit endorsement. Today's politics have become so cartoonish in the way Left and Right have become, that we've forgotten all about nuance. So I'm not going to apologize for studying these things, I'm not going to apologize for saying, yes, there is some intellectualism that has occurred on the Alt Right, and I'm not -- guess what -- because I say that The Daily Stormer has the right to free speech, it doesn't make me a neo-Nazi! Because I don't believe in everything that the ADL proclaims as decree, does not make me an anti-Semite. And to this point, because Gad Saad, his own personal follow-up video to the footage that you released, I have to say: it was something else! "Faith Goldy means nothing to me" -- then... proceeds to spend 13 minutes talking about me... casts all of my audience as anti-Semites, and then says basically "don't show me who you are, show me who your friends are" -- guilt by association. Well Professor Saad: The fact that I was about to share a stage with at least two panelists who I understand are of the Jewish religion -- is that guilt by association? Am I all of a sudden pro-Jewish, a Zionist? Because all of a sudden the logic begins to break down, and I will say this to Gad Saad: He might not be aware of this. Okay, first point: Israel is a religious ethno-state. I support them as a religious ethno-state. In fact, I've argued on the record, in being in favor of the one-state solution. I love the wall in Israel: They understand demographics; that's why they don't naturalize millions of Arabs within the West Bank, because in 15 years they would be outnumbered and there would be a whole bunch of Arabs being elected to the Knesset. And I'm all for Israel's borders and self-determination... In fact, my clip [in] which I articulated my one-state solution became probably my most viewed clip in all my journalistic history -- tens of millions of people have watched that, and indeed, dare I say I'm a household name in Israel. So I find this business to be beyond insulting, but just ignorant. And how dare he get up there and say, basically, "Bring on the Jew-hating Faith... a Jew-hater by association..." It's okay to be Jewish! It's okay to be Christian! By the way there's some Christophobic nonsense going on on his comments of that YouTube video as well... But I have to say, I'm getting a little sick and tired of the victim card, I'm getting sick and tired of being told it's not okay to be a certain type of people, and if you say "it's just okay, not great, not better than" -- then all of a sudden that makes you a supremacist of some sort. ... All my life people have called me 'Islamophobic', 'homophobic', 'transphobic' -- now it's 'anti-Semite' and 'racist' and a 'white supremacist'. Bring it on. Your names don't scare me. All they are are code words for 'heretic' -- and you're darned right I'm a heretic when it comes to this modern, sick political culture that we're in right now.”